Sahih Muslim

Sahih Muslim is a collection of sayings and deeds of Prophet Muhammad (SAW), also known as the sunnah. The reports of the Prophet's sayings and deeds are called ahadith. Imam Muslim was a student of Imam Bukhari. He lived a couple of centuries after the Prophet's death and worked extremely hard to collect his ahadith. Each report in his collection was checked for compatibility with the Qur'an, and the veracity of the chain of reporters had to be painstakingly established.

The position of Imam Bukhari's Sahih in the literature is not, of course, unrivalled. Another Sahih was being compiled almost simultaneously, which was considered its superior by some, its equal by others, and second to it by most. This was the Sahih of Imam Muslim.

Like Imam Bukhari too, he wrote a good number of books and treatises on hadith, and on related subjects. Ibn anl-Nadeem mentions five books by him on the subject. Haajee Khaleefah adds the names of many other works by him in the same field. In his Sahih he examined a third of a million ahadith, from which he selected only about four thousand, which the hadith scholars unanimously regarded as sound.